The Empty Mandate and Unfunded Promises of House Bill 3

Anybody on the floor? Well, let's talk about real quick go to go back to my point earlier about they they just know enough to get something passed or to be able to have a thirty to forty five second conversation. To appease people. Right? Let's talk about Hb three, which just was passed in the eighty eighth legislation that talks about you know, putting an officer in every single campus. Well, that's great. It's great. You passed the mandate. You didn't fund it. That's the part that they failed to tell the public. Yeah. They'll say, well, we gave fifteen thousand dollars per campus. Great. What's that gonna do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You give fifteen thousand dollars for every single campus, but they gave local control for them to be able to decide how they spend that fifteen thousand and it doesn't say that it has to go to funding a law enforcement officer on every campus. You know the legislation legislation is screwed when it starts out with an exception. Yeah. Right. Is this our legislation or you can fill out this exception. But you know what's gonna happen is when the next governor governor's race comes around, what's what's gonna be said by governor Abbott's office? We passed a bill that says that we put a law enforcement officer in every campus. But did you? So I was recently at a school board meeting where this very thing came up and I got to read through the actual documentation the school board was doing, and they approved during that that meeting the, exception. Right? They went ahead and signed the exception. But what was interesting Now, this is this is a school. It's a pretty sizable school, and they have, their own police department. Yeah. They have their own police department. Right? And so what I found interesting was as part of their exception, they fast tracked a school guardian program. Right? And and I felt that it was really interesting that the school board ultimately voted for and signed off on based off of the chief's recommendation, this school guardian program, And the questions that the school board was asking the chief, it was clear that the school board members had no idea Yeah. What was involved in school guardian? They were asking questions about what's the training. What would the uniform look like Are they gonna have any mental health training to how to act with kids? You know, all of these things do are do they required to be T Cole certified? Are we getting their background records from all of these things? School board members aren't asking those questions if they're fully up to speed on, hey, this is a decision. This is a great decision. We need to do this. The decision was made. We can't find officers We've had requisitions out. We have this new requirement. And so even though we've previously kicked the can for years and years and years and years on this school guardian program, now because we have this house bill three, and we are gonna have to file an exception, we should go ahead and move forward with school guardians. Yeah. But that's all just a play on an individual who wants to arm teachers. That is a personal preference of somebody within that's a particular I'm not giving them credit. They their their plan is to hire retired they're only hiring retired law enforcement Right. They're retired for a reason. That's that's their plan. It's retired long for then. And so what house bill three the cause of this, right, was house bill three. Right? And, It was really interesting hearing the interaction about the training and and and what what are they gonna even wear? Like, what's, you know, what's gonna be the attire? And, And and and and basically, you know, this this school decided on they're gonna wear khaki pants and Apollo. That's gonna say something on it. It's scary. Yeah. Something. Guardian with their pistol. With their pistol. Yeah. Okay. And that they're there. But there was no formal training progress in a process of of, like, you know, hey, this is how you need to interact with kids. Yeah. I was gonna say what other duties are they gonna have? How does that enrich the culture and climate of this campus? Well, and and the other thing that was interesting is is that we know we've had a lot of other people, who've come here and speak, and we've talked about, you know, the the bucket, right? Of of mental health and how it only holds so much and then one day it overflows and it doesn't stop. Right? And so, Mia's officers are coming out of the field from a career in law enforcement and and what does that look like? And and are they even going any through any mental health and evaluations? Right? Well, we had we had Mike Barry on. And we talked about the effects of not having any type of trauma care for these individuals who are retired. Mike's been with or was with in law enforcement for forty three years. Right. Not once had he ever other than one time when he got into a shooting, Did he have any type of, you know, trauma care? Well, we had back Cooley here too. Well, Brent Cooley. It was another example. He said he said the same thing. Once it overflows, it overflows. It overflows. You know, Brit commonly refers to it as the is the slow drip. It's just slowly dripping life out of your body. And where you're you're no longer compassionate anymore. You know, Mike, you know, talked about how you know, he was a medical examiner as well for thirty one years. He responded to a fatality accident where it was his mother He had to process the scene of his mother's own fatality accident, and I asked him, did your agency or command staff, anybody ever check on you? Did they did they force you to go talk to someone about the trauma that you experienced? Cause he it was obvious that he experienced drama from that. Sure. And his answer was no. So, okay. So we've got a district that's hiring guardians that are all retired law enforcement. Are we going to require some type of mental health screening of that individual to even see if they're fit for duty? But the question should really be is if you're hiring your focusing on retired law enforcement, why did they retire in the first place? Well, And so And why do they wanna do this?